LITMIR.BIZ

      We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program.

      Napoleon Publishing/RendezVous Press

      Toronto, Ontario, Canada

      05 04 03 02 01 5 4 3 2 1

      National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

      H. Mel Malton, date—

      Dead cow in aisle three: a Polly Deacon murder mystery

      ISBN 0-929141-82-2

      I. Title.

      PR9199.3.M3462D42 2001

       Acknowledgements

      This book is dedicated to my dear aunt, Mary Elizabeth Tanton, who died in 2000. She would have liked this one the best and would have laughed like a drain at the LSJ bits.

      Many kind thanks to Teri Souter and Cate Elliot for sage advice and to Pat Misek, Lynn Uzans and Kareen Burns for moral support and a firecracker up the wahzoo at appropriate moments. I am indebted to my publisher, Sylvia McConnell, for her patience and steadfast confidence in Polly, and to my editor, Allister Thompson, who has more backbone than Becker does.

      This is a work of fiction. There are no intentional references to real people, events, places or things. If some things seem familiar to those living in the Muskoka area, well that’s just coincidental, eh?

       One

       There’s bargains here for everyone— At Kountry Pantree, saving’s fun!

      —An advertisement in the Laingford Gazette

      You’re a traitor, and you should be shot,” Aunt Susan said. She was sitting in the guest chair at my kitchen table, shelling peanuts and swigging beer out of a bottle.

      “I’m just doing a job, Susan,” I said. “The store would go ahead anyway, whether I’m involved or not. I have to eat, you know.” I was at my drawing board, preparing some sketches for the Kountry Pantree PR committee. They’d hired me to design and build a mascot costume for their new grocery superstore in Laingford.

      “Just doing a job—that’s my point,” Susan said, tossing a couple of unshelled peanuts to my dogs, who sat begging shamelessly at her feet. Crunch, crunch. “This thing is all about money. No matter what one’s principles might be, everyone has their price—even my own niece.”

      “I’m sorry I can’t afford to take a political stand with you right now,” I said. “I’ll support you behind the scenes if I can, though.”

      Susan snorted. “Maybe you’d be so good as to build a mascot for the League of Social Justice, then. A pit bull would be nice. Or an enraged bear. We’re going to fight the Kountry Pantree to the death, you know.” She placed a peanut on the table and brought her fist down on it, hard.

      Secretly, I thought that Susan’s newly-formed lobby group would be better represented by a valiantly squeaking mouse. You can’t halt progress when a bunch of fat-cat developers starts throwing money at Town Council.

      “The League is meeting down at George’s tonight, isn’t it?” I said.

      “Yes, and I came by to make sure that you’ll be there,” Susan said. “You have inside information about those sharks that will be very useful.”

      “I refuse to be a mole,” I said. Okay, maybe I’m going overboard with the animal imagery, but that’s the way it is with town planning issues. They bring out the beast in everybody. Survival of the fittest, dog eat dog, nature red in tooth and claw and all that. Grrrr.

      “We won’t ask you to divulge any company secrets,” Susan said. “We just need names and dates and that sort of thing. We don’t want to tip our hand just yet, and we decided it was better to get it from you than from the Gazette.”

      “The guy at the paper probably knows way more than I do,” I said. “He’s the one following the story.”

      Back in May, the Laingford Gazette had appeared on the stands with a big headline, “Council okays new Superstore.” Local reaction was swift and frantic. The new store, into its third month of construction where the main road into Laingford meets the highway, was going to be huge. It wasn’t so much a store as it was a shopping complex. Acres of state-of-the-art convenience, offering groceries, fresh flowers, a photo processing lab, a pharmacy, a video rental outlet, a fast food joint and, as they say, much, much more. The downtown business people were horrified.

      “It’ll kill the downtown core,” they said in angry letters to the paper.

      “It’ll create jobs and boost the economy,” its proponents countered. The arguments were academic anyway. After a dozen weeks of round-the-clock construction, the huge building was almost finished, growing like a toadstool in the muggy July air.

      The publisher of the Laingford Gazette, Hans Whiteside, had stirred up the small town very handily with inflammatory editorials and a public poll. “What do you think of the new superstore? Fill out this ballot and drop it off at the Gazette.” It was rumoured that Whiteside had a financial interest in the project, but he had kept the fire burning under the issue, presumably in order to make sure that everybody, for or against, kept on buying his paper. He had put his star reporter, young Calvin Grigsby, on the story, then sat back and watched the fur fly.

      “Town divided on Superstore issue,” the headlines went. “Kountry Pantree: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs,” said one, and “Is downtown doomed?” said another.

      The League for Social Justice (LSJ) was hastily formed in the weeks following the announcement. Its members, the owners of businesses threatened by the development, included a grocer, a pharmacist, a florist, a photo shop owner, a video store owner and the guy who owns the downtown pizza place.

      The League was my Aunt Susan’s idea. She owns a feed store in Laingford. Not that the Superstore proposed to sell agricultural supplies; Susan had been burned already by a big American farm supply company, the Agri-Am, opening up near her place on the other side of town. It had undercut her prices, poached her customers and crushed her like a potato bug. Her store was now up for sale, and her reasons for establishing the LSJ were revenge-based. As she said in a letter to the editor, “Corporate greed can devastate small business. I know first-hand. We need to join together to prevent it from happening again.”

      “Why don’t you invite Calvin Grigsby to your meeting?” I said. “He can give you the low-down, and at the same time, you’ll get some publicity.”

      “We don’t want publicity, at least not yet,” Susan said. “When we make our presentation at the next council meeting, we want it to be a surprise.”

      “Want what to be a surprise?” I said.

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