Miranda's War

by Foster, Howard;

  She slipped him a CD labeled “K.A-.I”

  “And this librarian chick who sits next to you, what’s her story?”

  “What do you want, Julia’s voice, writing, images of her home, husband?”

  “What’s she all about?”

  “She’s trying to do the right thing. She’s unsure.”

  He punched notes into his tablet.

  “I need to come out to Lincoln for a couple of hours. Get the feel out there.”

  “Take the train. Walk around the town center. You can even rent a bike and ride around the conservation land. It’s beautiful. But I need this in ten days. That means I want a rough cut a week from today. Where will we watch it?”

  “I’ll get one of the editing rooms for a half hour, Mrs. D. That’s five hundred bucks.”

  “I’m giving you five thousand now and the other five plus your costs when it’s done. Deal?”

  “Deal,” he said and held out his hand.

  She tore a check out of her checkbook, for the account in her own name that Archer did not know about, and slipped it to him.

  “I’m counting on you. What are the four words we discussed?”

  “Biting satire, brutal honesty.”

  She gave him a thumb drive and left. By the next morning he’d put together a montage of a strip mall running for what seemed like miles, then it evolved into the center of a suburb with cookie-cutter houses spreading in all directions. The bigger lots with large houses were split up and replaced by more of the small houses until the entire area was a grid of dozens of streets lined with such houses, many with tiny aboveground swimming pools, as far as the eye could see.

  “Nice,” she texted him, “but we don’t have aboveground swimming pools in Lincoln, at least not now.”

  “You want max gross-out, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Stephen called the Governor’s appointments secretary and told her it was “rude” not to return his calls for the last few weeks. Within an hour she returned his call and explained patiently that given his candidacy, a meeting would appear to take sides. Governor Samuelson would be happy to set up a call for later in the week if he wanted to discuss business affairs. But the agenda for the call had to be cleared and it could not exceed ten minutes.

  “Here’s the agenda, I’m very unhappy about H.B. 7662, known as the anti-snob zoning bill. I’d like the Governor to know how much this could hurt the state’s finances.”

  She promised to take up the matter with Governor Samuelson and “be in touch.” An hour later a legislative aide to the Governor called and told him they had not seen the bill and needed time to study it.

  Stephen was a moment from ending the call when the aide asked, “Why are you even interested in this?” changing tone to an off-the-record aside.

  “A lot of people in my district are asking me about it.”

  “Why?”

  “People are worried that it would make these small towns with one- and two-acre zoning change their rules. It’s like a dagger pointed right at them.”

  “It’s not on our radar.”

  “These are very wealthy towns, and I know the Governor doesn’t want anything that would stir up class warfare. So I’d like your assurance he’ll stop it before it gets too public.”

  Samuelson was the only non-partisan, independent Governor in the country. He’d been elected two years ago to clean up the state’s finances. A former chemist, he had a technical, non-emotional manner and tried to extinguish conflicts as quickly as possible. Stephen had dealt with his Secretary of Finance, and occasionally the Governor, on at least twenty municipal bond deals. They liked dealing with his firm, and he liked dealing with them. When his campaign was over and he returned to the firm, he hoped to continue the relationship. They would hear him out, and he might be able to put the whole zoning threat to rest and out of the campaign.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “We need to try and settle this,” said Julia.

  “I hope you don’t mind, I’ve got you on speaker,” said Miranda. “I’m looking at my son’s attempt at a paper on a documentary about baseball. It’s Ken Burns so it went on for hour after hour, which should be easy to critique. But his approach is so obtuse.”

  “I need you to pick up the goddamn phone!”

  “OK I’m here. Now find your backbone!”

  “My husband is furious about this. How’s yours?”

  “Archer wants and expects me to win the town meeting. Does he like this? Of course not. But it is what it is, Julia. We’ve got an inflexible old Tyrannosaurus rex of a chairman. And if this is the way he wants to go out, this is how he’s going to go out.”

  “Bob thinks we’re toast.”

  “We’re surrounded by wusses. I can’t believe their grandparents amassed such fortunes. Where did that moxie go?”

  “I want a way out of this—a settlement.”

  “How would that work?”

  “Let’s meet at 3:30 at Town Hall.”

  “Just the two of us?”

  “Let’s start with just us. I want to put together a joint statement of our position, something so the good people of Lincoln don’t think we’re off our collective nut.”

  “I like that, sort of a manifesto.”

  “That’s another of your fighting words, Miranda.”

  Miranda wanted to tell her how pathetic she sounded on the eve of battle, to quote one of her favorite passages from Richard the Lionheart on the eve of his departure for Jerusalem, or Henry V. But she couldn’t be herself with Julia. Every thought had to be nuanced, every impulse examined for shock potential. So the movie was strictly confidential. Julia could not know until the last possible minute.

  She showed up at Town Hall wearing the expression of impending disaster that Julia needed to see. She touched Julia’s shoulder and sighed as they walked into the building together. She listened to every sound Julia emanated and didn’t lose eye contact.

  “Remember,” Miranda said, “this is directed at me, not you. I’m the one who gets impeached if this passes.”

  “But I voted with you.”

  “Reluctantly. If I go, you’ll repair your relationship with Karl. You can always chalk it up to a temporary lapse in judgment and move on.”

  This was Karl’s great error in judgment, Miranda thought. He personalized the conflict and would look vindictive at town meeting. If he had sought removal of Julia and Nate as well, they would have reversed themselves on the sale and it would be over. Clearly he hadn’t read The Art of War or Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs, even though he’d been a federal judge and presided over thousands of cases, each of which was a mini war.

  Julia was always reassured by Miranda’s endless stream of largely invented statistics. When they were seated in the office and were sipping cups of pomegranate tea, Miranda told her about the sociology of uncertainty, that people fear an uncertain outcome more than the actual defeat.

  “I can’t tell you there is a 90% likelihood the resolutions will be defeated. But I can tell you you’re not really afraid of losing that vote. You’re afraid of what happens the next day, what your husband will say, what you’ll have to say to explain it to your friends. And I’ve freed myself of that. What will I say to people? I’ll say I was impeached from the Conservation Commission for trying to sell our museum for $14 million. Period. End of answer. It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?”

  She took a big sip and looked up at the ceiling.

  “My father started with nothing and fought his way up the corporate ladder by seizing every opportunity to show up his superiors,” Miranda continued. “The board of Fairbanks Scales noticed very soon he was superior.”

  “Who’s going to take the lead in explaining this at the town meeting?”

  “Me.”

  “What are you going to say?”

  “That Mr. Anderson is too timid. Words to that effect. People want their leaders to be leaders. Action is preferable to
inaction. Studies confirm that.”

  “No ‘I’m sorry for driving out of my lane’? No contrition?”

  “No. Here’s the deal I put together for the town, and this is why it’s a good deal. I understand Lincoln is uneasy about capitalism. They think it’s crass, it’s kitsch, it’s Donald Trump. And people like my father aren’t here. We would rather have 125 units of subsidized housing than one Emmett Kedzie. And my job, excuse me, our job, is to give capitalism a handsome, refined face. This deal does that.”

  Julia smiled.

  “I like that. Now I understand what you’re doing.”

  Then Karl walked into the room.

  “Mrs. Dalton, I hope you don’t mind the intrusion. I’m not eavesdropping; I’d like to speak to you alone for a few minutes.”

  “I can step out,” said Julia.

  “No, let’s go into the meeting room,” said Karl. “It’s empty.”

  She looked at Julia and wondered, “Is he going to make a citizen’s arrest?”

  “I want you to listen to him,” she said.

  They took their seats in the meeting room.

  “You shouldn’t put the town through this,” he said. “If I were still on the bench, you’d be held in contempt for your lack of respect. Everyone can see it.”

  “You’re putting us through it,” Miranda said from her place at the opposite end of the table. “You called this emergency town meeting.”

  “Have you actually listened to people in this town rather than talk at them?”

  “You and I are talking to different folks. The ones I talk to are receptive. They want to know the facts.”

  “I’m offering you the chance to resign now and avoid the opprobrium that’s sure to follow.”

  “No thank you, Mr. Chairman.”

  “You can’t really believe you’re going to persuade a majority of the town to go along with you, to basically vote no confidence in me, in my long record. I’ve been serving the town for twenty-three years.”

  “I know. And you were a federal judge and an eminent professor of administrative law, and many people respect what you’ve done. But will they impeach me for this deal? No.”

  “Your husband doesn’t agree with what you’re doing. He won’t be supporting you next week.”

  She froze.

  “Good day, Mrs. Dalton. We’ll let the people decide next Wednesday night.”

  He walked out. Miranda rejoined Julia.

  “He wouldn’t make that up,” said Julia. “He doesn’t do that.”

  “I know. He wants to get rid of me, off the Commission, out of Lincoln.”

  Miranda and Archer had a normal dinner forty-five minutes later except that tonight she could not look at him. She wondered if the emergency town meeting was actually Ted’s idea, filtered through Archer and accepted by Karl. It was announced the very day they had met Ted. This was probably the nadir of her life, even worse than the day she had been accused of stealing a pair of diamond earrings from the ladies’ locker room at Longwood and spent the next three hours with Archer, Ted and a Newton police officer trying convince them the whole thing should just be ascribed to a tennis court misunderstanding. If she was right, then the marriage was over.

  Late that night, well after they were all asleep, she went into Archer’s study, accessed his server, which she had first hacked five years ago but had not had occasion to access since, found the manuscript of the article he’d been working on for the last six months, and deleted 19 of the 187 footnotes. They were consequential ones; she knew the prestigious publications he relied upon for his major hypotheses. If he didn’t catch them and turned it in this way to the Society for the Study of Urban Planning, their editors would be obligated to initiate a formal charge of plagiarism, which would have to be reported to M.I.T. His career would be tarnished forever. And if he did notice the footnotes were gone, she would delete others. Now his reputation would be as much in her hands as hers was in his.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “No, no, no,” Miranda told Mike Dann in the small screening room at Boston University. “Effective propaganda is infused with satire. This is so serious. You can’t have a re-creation of the Commission vote with Karl looking like a Chairman is supposed to look. This actor you’ve got is playing him too straight.”

  “Keep watching, Mrs. D, I’ve got him fumbling with the laptop just like you wanted.”

  “That’s at the end of the sequence, much too late. Look, I’ve got at most ten minutes to turn the perception of this man from statesman to fossil. And this sequence just doesn’t do much. The other scene of him outside talking to that woman about Target and misunderstanding her, that was better. But this is basically wasting 38 seconds!”

  “I did that scene stoned.”

  “What?”

  “But I did the opening scene stoned too and you love it.”

  “Impressive.”

  “What’s Mr. D think of this?”

  “He doesn’t know.”

  “Oh, so you got the dough.”

  “No, actually he does.”

  “What is he, a closet case or a head case?”

  “Enough!”

  He took some notes.

  “You’ll like it, Mrs. D. ’Cause I wouldn’t mind doing the sequel.”

  “You want a sequel, then make them laugh at Karl,” she admonished. “This little movie is being shown free of charge. So my production budget is limited. But Garrett Tristan will be there watching.”

  “Woo, the lady has powerful friends.”

  “I do,” she said, and ran her right index finger down his chest, stopping just above his belt. “And if I pull this off, your movie is going to be part of his next documentary.”

  “Nice. Now leave me alone, Mrs. D if you want a new scene by tomorrow. I’ve got to get into that seminar room tonight to redo it.”

  She got up to leave, but not without his asking, “And how about a big Lincoln air kiss on the way out?”

  Giving him one, she felt his hand clutching her waist.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Archer, Ted, Karl and Scott Tully, the Lincoln town counsel, were in a conference room at Adams & Threlkeld. Archer demanded the meeting when Karl told him Miranda had not backed down, and in fact seemed emboldened as if she were on a quest for vindication.

  “How about some sort of letter from the Board of Selectmen?” asked Archer.

  “Saying what?” asked Scott, beginning to show irritation at being thrust into the middle of the dispute between warring factions of town officials. “I represent the town, which means I have to be neutral.”

  “Bullshit! You have an obligation to avoid emergencies,” said Ted.

  “I’ve been here for over an hour now, away from my work, and I’d like to know what you want me to do.”

  “I want you to draft a letter to Miranda stating that she is costing the taxpayers thousands of dollars and she should resign.”

  “Show me some law on that, Mr. McFarland. What authority do I have to take sides?”

  “You represent the town, and surely it’s in the interest of the town to avoid an emergency town meeting.”

  “What about the Antar decision?” said Karl, referring to a case that allowed a town’s Board of Selectmen to cancel an emergency town meeting the day before it was scheduled in order to negotiate a compromise and end the dispute. “That seems to give the town a lot of discretion.”

  “I agree, sir, we can negotiate, and we can cancel the town meeting if the Selectmen vote to do that. But my position is to represent the town, not you. I answer to the Chairman of the Board of Selectmen, Bayard Cahill. If he wants to send Commissioner Dalton a letter, then I’ll advise him what he can and cannot say.”

  “Can the Selectmen tell her she’s out of line?” asked Archer.

  “They already have by voting for an emergency town meeting.”

  “OK, then how about a statement advising her she’s acting improperly in voting to sell the Pierce House
?”

  “They asked me to do that, but I concluded we just can’t say that. The Commission has the authority to sell the Pierce.”

  “But they can recommend against it,” said Karl. “I’ve talked to all five of them. It’s unanimous.”

  “The Selectmen can say whatever they want. But under the Municipal Advocacy Code, the other side gets equal time.”

  “So she gets a rebuttal?” asked Ted.

  He nodded.

  “Our hands are tied,” said Karl. “Legally we can’t take any other action before the meeting. And that’s perfectly fine with me. I called this meeting. I want it to go forward.”

  “You don’t know what she’s going to do. Nobody knows her next move,” said Archer. “She’s going to surprise you.”

  “I’d like to send a letter threatening to sue her for the costs of the town meeting,” said Ted.

  “The town can’t do that,” said Karl.

  “And that means me. It would come from my exchequer,” said Archer.

  “Oh please, it’s a threat. It doesn’t mean they’re going through with it.”

  “She knows there’s no authority. You send that letter, and she’ll bring it up at the meeting as Exhibit A in her case against you.”

  “I’m putting an associate on this for five hours of research.” Ted punched an extension into the phone.

  “Five more hours?” Archer said. “Even at your friends and family rate, it’s expensive.”

  “No charge, old boy. Not to worry.”

  A young Asian woman appeared carrying a yellow legal pad and a pen.

  “Good morning, Mr. McFarland,” she said.

  “Bill this to Archer Dalton slash Miranda slash emergency town meeting.”

  He directed her to sit down, introduced everyone and recited the facts.

  “I want a memo from you by 6:00 today detailing what options the town has in order to deter Mrs. Dalton from going through with this. Here are some thoughts. This list is, of course, non-exclusive and subject to your thinking. Can we initiate some action to have her declared mentally unfit? She’s very narcissistic, suffers from grandiose visions of herself, loses touch with reality, has been accused of theft.”