"You paid two hundred and seventy-one thousand dollars for that house."
"I did." I looked at my hands. "And Mr. Pettiford paid for it once already, in 1988, and lost it over a lien for nineteen thousand dollars. I'm aware of the arithmetic, counselor. I'll take my chances with the truth. That's the job I'm here to do. I can't very well start by making an exception for myself."
Rafferty put his half-glasses back on and looked at me over them for a long moment. "You know," he said, "Lorenzo Quarterman was in my sister's class at Fernhill High. Played trumpet. Couldn't march to save his life."
"No," I said. "He never could."
The regular meeting of the Fernhill City Council on Monday, September fifteenth, was held at seven p.m. in the council chambers on the second floor of City Hall, a long room with wood paneling, a raised dais, a flag in each corner, and about ninety folding chairs, all of them full. It was the last meeting for Chief Ellsworth Breedlove, who'd served twenty-two years, the last fourteen as chief, and half the department had come in uniform to see him off. There was a sheet cake in the lobby with a police shield on it in blue frosting. The local paper had a photographer. Breedlove sat in the front row in his dress blues, a big, white-haired man with a red face and a laugh you could hear in the parking lot, and every few minutes somebody leaned over to shake his hand.
Garrett Kessling sat two seats down from him. I recognized him from the department website: mid-fifties, compact, dark hair going gray at the temples, a jaw like a cinder block. He was in uniform too. He wasn't shaking any hands. Beside him sat Tamara, in a cream-colored suit, and when she looked down the row and saw me, she smiled the professional smile of a real estate agent recognizing a former client and then, slowly, stopped smiling, because she was trying to figure out why a former client would be sitting in the front row on the other side of the aisle, in a suit, next to the city manager.
My father sat beside me in his brown cardigan and his good hat, which he'd taken off and held on his knee. He'd had a good day. He'd known exactly where we were going and why, and in the car he'd said, "Your mother would have liked this," and then, "Lorenzo would have worn a terrible tie," and both things were true.
I didn't see Marcella come in, but I knew when she did, because Fitzgerald Okwu, who was sitting three rows back, caught my eye and lifted his eyebrows. She was near the aisle in the fourth row, in a pale blue blazer, with a framed certificate on her lap and a folder of papers. She had not seen me. She was looking at the dais.
The meeting began with the Pledge and a prayer by the pastor of First Methodist. There was a proclamation honoring Chief Breedlove, read by Mayor Lenore Underhill, a brisk, silver-haired woman who'd been a pharmacist for thirty years and ran the meeting like a counter with a line out the door. Breedlove stood and made a short, funny speech about how he'd been chief so long he remembered when the department's only computer was a Commodore 64. People laughed. He thanked his wife, his officers, his deputy chief "Garrett, who really ran the place," and he sat down to a standing ovation. I stood with everyone else. He'd done some good things in Fernhill. You don't get to twenty-two years without doing some.
Then Mayor Underhill said, "We'll now take public comment. Each speaker has three minutes. First on the sign-up sheet is Mrs. Marcella Vasbinder, representing the Bittern Ridge Homeowners Association."