Chapter 22 of 22In Your Defense

The packet put the vote first: termination of the director, effective upon adjournment. Second came the transfer of everything in Maeve Higgins's office to the chair of the board — files, ledgers, and the contents of her safe, which would be opened the moment a court order arrived.

She read it twice in the Forester with the engine off. Rain hung over the ridge without falling. Nine manila folders rode in the canvas tote on the passenger seat, and she had made every copy herself at her kitchen table, because she didn't trust the office machine to be the only one that knew.

Leo Ramirez waited on the carriage house steps at the Oakhaven Heritage Gardens in his good shirt, the collar of which refused to lie flat. Sam Cole's truck sat three spaces down, Sam behind the wheel with a seed catalog open on his knee.

"They moved it to six," Leo said. "Chen sent a revised packet at 5:12. I printed it at the office."

"I saw it."

"Ruthann Pike is out front with two signs. Sheryl brought a photographer."

"She would."

Leo looked at the tote. "You're carrying those in?"

"If they let me."

"Then make them let you."

Sam got out of his truck as she crossed the gravel and fell in beside her with his hands in his pockets.

"Two hours, maybe," he said. "I'll be in the lot."

"You don't have to."

"I know." He stopped at the bottom step. "Nine folders. That's a lot of paper for one woman to carry alone."

"It isn't heavy."

"No," he said. "It isn't."

Sheryl Potts caught her at the corner of the carriage house, in a yellow rain jacket with the hood down and a notebook already open against her palm. A camera flashed somewhere behind her.

"Director. Any comment on tonight's vote?"

"I haven't seen the vote yet."

"The packet says termination." She smiled with her whole face. "Is there anything you'd like the town to know?"

Maeve kept walking. "Good evening, Sheryl."

Inside, someone had set out a sleeve of Fig Newtons and a gallon jug of sweet tea from the Food Lion out on Route 340, which struck Maeve as either kindness or cruelty, and she could not decide which. Nine trustees sat along the long table under the bare bulbs. Julian Thorne had come without a vote and with a leather portfolio he never opened. Beatrice Thorne sat in the back row against the wall, in pearls, saying nothing.

"We have one item worth the evening," David Chen said. "Whether this board can still trust its director to put the Gardens ahead of a private theory."

Julian leaned back in his chair. "I've been patient, friend. Twelve days ago, Maeve stood in this room and told you she had evidence of something historic. She has produced no document. No name. No date."

He tapped the portfolio. "What she has produced is a bill."

"If she has documents, let her produce them," he added. "Tonight. I'd like to see them myself."

"Then give me the floor," Maeve said.

"The floor belongs to the resolution," Chen said.

"The resolution is about me."

"Yes."

Chen turned a page. "The Covington Foundation withdrew its grant on the twenty-second. Forty-two thousand dollars. Sixty-two children lose a summer program, and the eight seasonal hires we promised them are gone. The endowment is down three years running. The Gardens' name is in every conversation in this town, and not one of them is kind."

Warren Doyle looked up from his packet. "Is the survey invoice correct?"

"It is," Maeve said.

"Thirty-one thousand four hundred dollars," Julian said. "For a survey that found nothing. There is still eight hundred fifty thousand dollars on this table, and the board has been told it cannot take it."

"Commonwealth Cultural Resources worked a single day," Maeve said. "They stopped at the creek because the ground was soft and the truck was heavy, then wrote a conclusion about the acres behind it. Read their methodology section."

Across the table, Beatrice Thorne had folded her hands on her knees and closed her eyes, the way people do at funerals during a long eulogy. She had not spoken once.

Bill Rankin turned his pen over twice. "Director, did you know that invoice was coming to us?"

"I know it now."

"That isn't an answer." He said it to the table, not to her.

"It isn't," she said.

Then Rankin set the pen down. "I voted to table the sale in May because I wanted the record checked. What happened instead is that you made a claim you couldn't back, and the checking got done by the people who want our land." He looked along the table. "I don't like a single page of this packet. I also can't find a page in it that's wrong."

"I've sat on this board eleven years," Dorothy Claggett said. She held a pen in each hand for no reason Maeve could see. "I've never seen the town this hot. Four donors won't take my calls anymore."

She turned the pens over. "Maeve, honey, I've liked you since you were shelving returns at the library. But I can't take a rumor to the Rotary Club."

Nella Bassett didn't look up. "The trust language is plain. The board acts in the institution's interest. Not the director's."

Maeve stood and lifted the tote onto the table. "Then let me put it in front of you. Nine copies. Letters, a journal, a photograph. Five minutes."

Chen didn't look at the bag. "You've had those for weeks, Ms. Higgins. You didn't bring them when they would have helped this board. You brought them when they'd help you." He straightened the packet with two fingers. "That's the case. It's the whole case."

She kept her hand flat on the canvas. Under her palm, in the folder on top, was the photograph from Thomas Miller's kitchen table, taken in 1925, the corners gone soft with age. She had carried it two hours east on Memorial Day and two hours back, and now it sat beside a jug of sweet tea while a lawyer explained her judgment to her.

Rain began to tick on the carriage house roof, slow at first, then steady enough that two trustees glanced up.

"David —" Dorothy said.

"All in favor of the resolution."

Hands went up around the table. Warren Doyle's first. Nella Bassett's. Bill Rankin's, after a pause long enough to water a flat of seedlings. Dorothy Claggett raised hers last, and slow, and watched Maeve the whole time. Nobody at the table looked at her afterward. Doyle studied his packet. Bassett capped her pen. Rankin stared at the window like a man waiting on a bus that ran once a day.

"David," Dorothy said again.

Chen drew his breath to declare it.

"David." She lowered her hand and turned in her chair. "Ms. Higgins. Do you have anything to say in your defense?"