Page 55 of Demon and the Raven

I groaned.

“In case you’re wondering, the town-hall meeting has been moved to one,” she explained.

“How did you manage that?”

“I told the mayor when she informed me of her proposed time that at noon I was eating and not convening for anything. I also pointed out that if we waited, Lorne would have more information to give the community than merely the facts of the crime, and the more answers he had, the better everyone would feel. Knowing if we do or do not have a murderer in our midst is eating away at all of us.”

“That was good thinking.”

“Well, let’s face it. I put her in office, I can take her out.”

“That’s not why she moved the meeting.”

She tipped her head, brow arched, daring me to contradict her.

“You’re a bully.”

“Yes,” she agreed.

The reality was, Amanda owned more land in Osprey, both commercial and residential, than anyone else. Even if somehow Allard Pace bought every commercial piece available, he would maybe own a third of what was not privately owned. Amanda, who had been abandoned by her family, taken in by me and my grandfather, and then became a self-made multimillionaire, had returned to her hometown with a vengeance after college. She was a wonderful, caring, kind person—but you didn’t want to cross her. She also sat on every board that had any kind of pull in the community, and had been the one to insist on hiring a city manager. It was time to drag Osprey into the twenty-first century.

I put my hands over JJ’s ears. “Are Diana and Ken going to give Troy any trouble because his bees are alive and theirs are dead?”

“No,” she assured me. “And I’m having new hives flown in for both of them, which they both lavishly thanked me for first thing this morning.”

I moved my hands from JJ’s ears.

“I heard all that,” I was told. “You were worried I’d cry about the bees, huh?”

“I was.”

“I cried this morning.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We made a donation to the global bee fund.”

“I had no idea there was such a thing, but that’s good.”

“Even though Ms. Flint and Mr. Slater thanked Mom for the new bees, Mom still called them bad names when we walked away from them at the farmers’ market.”

“Oh yeah? What’d Mom call ’em?”

“Dad said it was naughty to repeat them.”

“Did it start with a b?”

They shook their head, big blue eyes on me. “No. The letter c for Ms. Flint and a d for Mr. Slater.”

I looked up at my best friend, who crossed her arms and glared.

“Really? That was early in the morning for the c word.”

Quick grunt from her.

“And the d?” I inquired.

“Dickhead.”