The Crowsbrook Demons

Chapter 8

The meeting was in a much smaller room than Sarah had expected, though it was about as bland: beige walls and tedious office boardroom chairs and tables lined up in rows with mostly bored-looking citizens behind them, doing their civic duty. There weren't very many people there, even though it was seven o'clock. Sarah recognized the woman that she'd encountered in the shop on her first day. Maureen, she thought Jake had called her.

Maureen wasn't bored, though. She was angry.

"I don't know what the heck you think you're doing, Norman Bastable," she said right off the bat, addressing the leader of the small group of councillors ensconced behind the table at the front, "but you must have maggots in the brain, as well as on the brain if you think this is a good idea. Putting a maggot factory smack dab in the middle of the Foxglove Pond? The lot of you are out of your minds. Have you thought about the pollution? The increase in traffic in Crowsbrook? The effect it'll have on the kids? The smell, for goodness' sake? It's not an industrial area. It's a residential area. And yet it's got this far already. You people can stop it; you should have stopped it weeks ago. I don't know why we're only just hearing about it now, but you're going to have one heck of a fight on your hands, if you try to push this through. And don't think it doesn't look bad." She took a deep breath. "I've known you a long time, Norm...Mr. Bastable. You too, Annie Casey. And I have to say that, on a personal level, I always thought you were upstanding people. But pushing this through—pushing it through with minimal time for consultation with the public—with the people who live in Crowsbrook, for goodness' sake—looks bad. Very bad. And I can assure you, that if procedures are not followed properly, I for one won't be shy in asking some very awkward questions."

Sarah believed her. Maureen didn't look like the kind of person who would be shy about asking difficult questions. But district councillors taking kickbacks wasn't the problem. Much as Sarah hated to admit it—even to herself—the incident with the meeting notice outside the shop had unnerved her. She wasn't surprised that there were so few people there. She suspected that someone was working hard to make sure that people either didn't know or didn't care what was going on.

Someone, or something.

Sarah stifled a yawn. The whole atmosphere in the room was beige. Didn't stop Maureen, though; she seemed like the sort of person whose opinions, once formed, had the solid foundations and lasting construction of a small gothic cathedral. Still. Sarah studied the councillors. Was it her imagination, or did they look oddly...blank?

"Thank you, Mrs. Greenwood," said Mr. Bastable, an older, fat man in a tweed jacket and thick glasses who was sitting behind a table at the front of the room. For someone who had apparently known Maureen Greenwood for a long time, he seemed strangely unmoved by her impassioned speech and her intimations of wrongdoing. "Your points will be taken into consideration."

"They'd better be," sputtered Maureen. "Totally illegal, what these developers want to do. Outrageous. You can't put a maggot factory in the middle of the greenbelt, for goodness' sake." She sat down, still muttering.

A young woman with a toddler on her lap raised her hand and introduced herself as Sally Jenson. She was obviously nervous, and she had dark rings under her eyes.

"Is this—" She coughed a couple of times, and then blew her nose. "Is this factory going to be hiring a lot of people? Because that would be good for the area, wouldn't it? A big factory. Give people something to do, without them having to take the bus for an hour each way to work." She coughed again. The toddler didn't look well either; she looked as though she ought to be home in bed, or waiting to see a good doctor, to Sarah. A large rash covered one side of the child's face, and she was limp and lethargic, like a rag doll.